“Foreign currency purchases imported at the wrong value”
A meal abroad appears in your register at a figure that matches neither the menu price nor what the bank charged you. Statement formats carry a currency per transaction, and the confusion begins when the file, the account and the software each assume a different one.
Symptoms
Amounts are in the right ballpark but consistently wrong Only transactions made abroad are affected A separate fee line accompanies each foreign purchase
What actually causes it
The file carries the original currency
Some exports state the amount in the currency of purchase along with a rate, rather than the converted amount your account was charged. Software that ignores the currency field books the foreign figure as though it were home currency.
The conversion fee is a separate transaction
Many banks post the purchase and its foreign-transaction fee as two entries. Neither line matches the total you expected, which reads as a wrong amount rather than as two correct ones.
The account is single-currency
An account configured for one currency has nowhere to record another, so the number is stored as-is and quietly misrepresented.
How to fix it
- Drop the file into the fixer below to see the exact amounts and any currency indicators the bank sent — that settles which figure is actually in the file.
- Compare one known purchase against the bank statement to establish which convention your export uses.
- If the file carries original-currency amounts, use your app's multi-currency support rather than editing values by hand; hand edits do not survive the next import.
- Account for fee lines deliberately, so a purchase and its fee are not mistaken for a wrong amount.
Related import problems
Skip the manual edit — fix it automatically
The fixer reports amounts exactly as sent and refuses to normalise any value whose format is ambiguous, so nothing is silently reinterpreted. Free, no signup, no upload.
Open the fixer